


spit it out and back again

by thedevilbites



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Horcruxes, Implied Sexual Content, Manipulation, Mild licking kink??, Sexual Tension, Tom is more naive but also no he isn't because he's Tom, dark!Rowena, it's like they're playing chess but they're the pieces and one of them knows the future??, loose ends, open-ended, psychic!Rowena, slight sadistic feels but very much implied, unresolved shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:40:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24885475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilbites/pseuds/thedevilbites
Summary: He slaps a clammy hand over her mouth, and stares resolutely at the ridges of his knuckles until his fingers turn numb.
Relationships: Rowena Ravenclaw/Tom Riddle
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3





	spit it out and back again

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by @provocative_envy 's story Lone Wolf !! thank you for bestowing that wonderful fic, go check it out!
> 
> also um yeah I guess this is a coming of ageish story for Tom but also not at all and basically an excuse to play with someone else manipulating him you know?
> 
> also also i am craving a beignet, anyone else or just me??

“You’re lying,” she tells him, voice clear and sharp and carefully pronounced, eyes gleaming up at him like polished shards of obsidian. 

Tom steps forward, shoes clicking obnoxiously against the marble floor. His wand dangles loosely in his right hand. His robes twist and twirl behind him, serpentine. 

He cocks his head to the side when he reaches her. Something vaguely unsettling winds his way around his stomach, and he tightens his grip on his wand. It’s an incremental movement. A deliberate, _delicate_ crook of his fingers.

Rowena Ravenclaw doesn’t react. 

“But I haven’t even told you anything,” Tom murmurs, flashes thick dark lashes and a teasing, positively sultry smile in her direction.

Her chest doesn’t move, but she exhales noisily. It’s irritating and patronizing and too fucking loud for the distance between them.

His grin slides off of his face. She should be eating out of the palm of his hand by now. 

Rowena’s eyes harden. “You will.” 

Then she’s _beaming_ down at him, all breathy exhale and crisp white teeth like a mouth filled with lacquered chips of bone. 

Her smile breaks her face neatly in half. 

Tom thinks of his soul, hanging in perfectly symmetrical ribbons from his chest. 

He thinks of glowing orbs and charred hands and fluttering whispering _billowing_ ashes that shade the sky like a swarm of restless locusts.

Tom shakes his head. Elegantly scoffs. He refuses to let some pretty doily of a girl stop him.

—

She leaves him alone while he searches.

But all he does is search search search search search search search until he can’t tell up from down or left from right and he’s so so tired and dizzy and he falls to the floor — he sinks he collapses he _flutters_ to the ground like a yellowing autumn leaf under the midday sun — in a jumble of tangled limbs, or maybe it’s his _thoughts_ that are a ball of tangled limbs: the crooks of elbows and knees, lean stringy legs, the long column of a throat, and the sharpened cliff of a jaw all knotted together and indiscernible from one another. 

He wakes up with his cheek pressed into the cold marble, body sore and prickling and stiff as though rigor mortis has set in. His back aches and cracks when he sits up. 

He looks up, and his lips part softly. Slowly. 

Rowena is sitting across from him.

“Did you find it?” She murmurs, soft and light and airy, like a delicate perfectly-powdered beignet. 

Tom raises an eyebrow at her mutely. She’s wearing the oddest sort of smile, a little rivulet in the thin thin line of her lips. His hands twitch. 

“Help me up,” Tom says instead. He holds his arm out, palm turned upwards to the sky.

She doesn’t even hesitate. Wordlessly slips her hand in his, and pulls. It’s like he’s shaking hands with water. Combing his fingers through a glistening fog but it’s _tangible_. Thick. Cold, too, like frost quietly clinging onto stained glass windows.

Her hand slips away as soon as he’s on his feet, but she doesn’t move away. Her eyes flicker in amusement. 

He tilts his head.

She’s attractive in a painfully obvious way. He runs his eyes over her high, arching cheekbones, the delicate slivers of her collarbones. Her skin is smooth, pale and strangely luminescent, as if there’s a light turned on inside of her. He wonders if she has any birthmarks. Freckles. Scars. 

She’s staring back at him archly. He doesn’t like the look in her eyes. Like she knows something. Knows more than what people usually see when they look at him. 

He leans closer and breathes directly in her face and she makes a little noise, halfway between a moan and a gasp, that makes all his blood flow directly to his groin.

He shifts his weight, twitches one finger. She’s too careful. Neutral. Controlled.

“Leave me alone,” he whispers, slightly flushed, and she fades under his breath like mist slipping through his fingertips. 

—

There’s something slithering around under that gleaming skin of hers.

He can _sense_ it.

He wants to strip her down layer by layer until there’s nothing left but old skin clinging to older bones. Until there’s only thick black hair falling away in loose clumps from a soft scalp that sags inwards like a mushy, melting stick of butter. 

Melt, yes yes yes _yes._

He wants her to _melt._

__

“You’re something dark, aren’t you?”

“Excuse me?” She brushes a strand of hair behind her ear, slowly spins on the balls of her feet to face him. Her dress is deep blue, with sheer lace trimming around the hem like royal icing piped meticulously onto a cake. 

Tom focuses on the delicate folds of skin around her eyes, the bend of her lips, paper-thin skin cracking all dry and parched and desert-scorched in the corners of her mouth, barely-visible. Skims the hinge of her jaw. Her cheeks are flushed a rosy pink.

He steps towards her, closer closer _closer._ He could reach out and touch her, if he wanted. 

He glances up at her. Something warm and sticky oozes down his spine.

When he presses his lips against her neck, she doesn’t hide her shiver like he expects. Her skin is cold. And wet. Like that one brief moment before a handful of ice cubes shudder, and begin to melt. 

He presses a damp kiss to the column of her throat. It’s not particularly a good one, either, this he knows; it’s too moist, all saliva and too much tongue. 

But she moans. _Loudly._ Her voice echoes down the glistening halls, and he latches onto her shoulder, sucking at the exposed flesh like a leech. He wonders if she bruises.

“What you’re looking for, you won’t find here.” Her head is tipped back, but he can see her smile into the air, bright shards of her teeth reflecting garishly off of the mirrored ceiling. 

He delatches from her skin with an obscenely wet “pop.” 

There’s a smile playing on her lips. It’s different, though. Not mocking, but something close. Something _warped._

“If I’m a dark thing, then what are you, Tom?”

He turns his back on her when she convulses into peals of laughter. 

__

She’s warm under his hands. Or, she gets warmer, eventually, the disquieting chill of her skin glistening like a lake and turning into something _more_ ; something darker and heavier and solid, like wet clay drying into a hard, cracked mold under the pads of his fingers.

He thinks he’s getting somewhere, thinks she’s closer to telling him _why_ and _how_ and _where_ it is— and then she props herself up on her elbows and bites into the narrow, wiry line of his neck. 

Her teeth sink through his skin, and the tips of her teeth pierce his bone. He feels the exact moment it happens. He feels—he feels nauseous.

A pregnant pause filled only with her twinkling eyes and his shallow, wheezing pants as he struggles to control himself to stay quiet to _freeze._

Tom’s whole body tingles. Shudders. Spasms.

And then he’s shaking her off and flipping her over, slotting a knee neatly between her thigh, fingers fumbling for her chin, pulling her head back. 

He takes in the deliberate _crack_ of her skull on the gelid floor without looking up, and then her neck is fully exposed there there _there_ and he’s burrowing into her flesh like some kind of frenzied, rabid dog being fed for the first time in weeks and now _she’s_ the one under him _she’s_ the one shaking _she’s_ the one gasping and wriggling and writhing—

Why does it still feel like _she’s_ the one in control? 

He slaps a clammy hand over her mouth, and stares resolutely at the ridges of his knuckles until his fingers turn numb. 

—

“At least tell me what color it is.”

“Is the _color_ really going to help, at this point?”

Her delicate smirk echoes off of white-washed, antiquated bookshelves and artfully hand-crafted china chipped from use and a pair of carefully polished Louboutin heels, the red soles peering up at him like a sticky red mouth. 

Tom passes a glistening, gilded birdcage tilted precariously on its side, ignoring Rowena’s raised eyebrow, the haughty twitch of her fingers as they drum against her hip.

“If I know the color then I’m one step closer—“

“Why does it interest you so much?” She interrupts him, gently raising herself up on the tips of her toes. If he hadn’t been forced to learn the seemingly endless history of ballet at the orphanage, he might have thought she was a professional ballerina. 

But the slight angle her toes hit the ground as she twirls around him is _wrong_ and the way her arms splay out about her is _wrong_ and she should be _gliding_ , really, not waltzing when she does a glissade across the pale marble.

He stares at the birdcage again. Some of the bars are rusted, but still create the illusion of being the same as their glistening neighbors. He curls his fingers around them. 

“I need it.” 

She smiles, and it’s more of a short huff this time that accompanies rather than a laugh. “Sweetheart, you don’t even know what it _is_.” She sinks into a deep plié next to him, and then adds, almost as an afterthought, “See, I told you you'd lie to me.”

“Well, if you would just _tell_ me where—“

“Then I would be the one lying.”

Tom blinks at her. His teeth click and grind uncomfortably against each other. He unwelds his jaw. 

“What do you _want_ from me?” He snaps, angry and bitter and spiteful, all the things he’s tried to avoid floating to the surface. 

Something groans beneath him.

His fingers are white against the cage. Tom carefully disentangles his hands. Forces himself to take a deep breath.

“I want you to tell me the truth.” She lilts, twirling shifting _transforming_ right in front of him, voice smooth and flawless, like the crisp neat flakes on a buttery croissant. 

“I’ve _never_ lied to you,” he hisses. He’s breathing hard again. 

She purses her lips, now suddenly sitting on the closed lid of a grand piano that’s still somehow standing with only three legs intact. Her bare feet dangle like a pendulum, barely skimming the floor.

She crooks a finger at him, and he steps closer.

When she leans in, he feels the hairs on the nape of his neck turn to icicles.

“Why does it interest you so much?” She asks again. 

He pauses. 

“I _want_ it.”

Rowena’s smile is thin and wry and a little saddened, too, and he watches her eyes fog and glaze over. 

Somewhere in the world, it starts to rain.

“It’s not what color it is,” she tells him, “but what you _do_ with it.”

She leans back on her wrists, carefully twirls a strand of her hair around her index finger, and doesn’t say anything as he spins on his heels and fades away into the dusty aisles.

—

He breezes by a mattress embroidered with blue and gold sparrows. Half the packed foam that was stuffed inside it ripples onto the floor, making it sag and twist, although he can’t find the hole. 

He nudges a stray bit of foam with his shoe, sends it flying into the air, before continuing onward.

He passes cast-iron pots and pans splotched with some glistening blue substance that shimmers and shivers when he looks too closely and a bench with stuffed rabbits arranged by color from a pale pastel pink to a flowery hypnotic purple. 

There are hooks and quilts and broken shards of tea mugs and, as he makes a senseless right turn down one of the halls, an antiquated, oak vanity piled high with sparkling rose-gold combs and a whole set of crystal tiaras glinting with rhinestones and emeralds and deep blue sapphires that remind Tom of thick salty air and well-kept secrets crouching in damp musty caverns. 

He’s just reached the end of the aisle and is about to make another right, a blackened armchair that vaguely resembles a plaid pattern and looks as though it’s seen better days is waiting for him as he turns when—

He freezes. 

He tilts his head.

He _backtracks._

Tom Riddle pinches Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem between his index finger and thumb. A rose-gold comb slides from its perch and falls to the floor. 

Tom inhales the echo of its fall and the stale air around him and the permeating sense of dread and loss and fury of millions. It’s the past and the present and the future: lives ripped senselessly from families and friends, and the inconsolable grief that follows for centuries. 

He waits until the dust around him stirs and settles. 

Then he leaves the Room of Requirement without looking back, but not before he brushes his fingertips lightly over Rowena’s cheek and grins at her answering shiver.

“I’ll destroy it.” He tells her, catching her gaze in the dim light, chin raised high and spine straight. Stiff.

She smiles at him, but he doesn’t think it quite reaches her eyes. 

“Promise me.” She whispers, but her voice sounds small and weak, like she’s speaking to him through a keyhole. He wonders for the first time what will happen to her. 

But then he tilts his head, eyes glistening all lazy and hypnotic, and he says, “I promise,” voice firm and steady like he means it.

**Author's Note:**

> heehee hope you enjoyed !!
> 
> ;)


End file.
